Automatic espresso makers have transformed the consumer coffee experience. Instead of making a pot of coffee, consumers can now hit a button and a computer would grind the beans, heat the water, tamp it down, and electronically dispense the perfect cup of coffee. Most people just want a great cup of coffee in the morning, and a great glass of wine at night, yet there is no way to have a perfect wine by the glass experience.
One of the critical elements is serving temperature. Every wine has a proper serving temperature. Each varietal requires a different temperature to maximize both aromas and flavor. Maintaining wine at these serving temperatures is incredibly difficult with current technology. Each wine varietal requires a different temperature to maximize both aroma and flavor, and some people prefer to deviate from the recommended serving temperature for a given wine, preferring it either colder or warmer temperature than recommended.
Traditional home refrigerators are typically far too cold to be used to chill a wine to serving temperature, so they are not effective. The use of ice buckets also severely flawed because the wine begins too warm and ultimately gets too cold as ice is below 32 degrees. Moreover, the temperature of the wine within a bottle can vary wildly, with the temperature of the wine along the bottle (i.e., that is in close contact with the ice) may be far cooler than the wine in the center of the bottle.
Dedicated wine refrigerators have been introduced to chill different types of wine to different temperatures for long-term storage. These refrigerators are generally not, however, effective for cooling a single bottle of wine to serving temperature, as they typically chill all red wines to a single aging temperature and are not able to chill each varietal independently. Further, some wines actually need to be warmed after exiting the wine refrigerator to reach the proper serving temperature, and there are no systems that contain an integrated heating method to accomplish this. Still further, the moment the bottle is removed from the refrigerator it comes into contact with the ambient air and begins to warm to room temperature. As a result, these systems are not effective for the serving of wine.
Embodiments of the present disclosure overcome these and other issues and allow each individual bottle of wine to be brought to its perfect serving temperature and this serving temperature maintained.
Additionally, wine suffers from an incredible sensitivity to oxygen, which can turn expensive wine into worthless vinegar within days. Worse, the older the wine, the more sensitive it is to oxygen, putting the rarest and most expensive bottles the most at risk.
Some previous attempts to assist consumers, restaurants, and wineries in solving this problem include the use of vacuum pump-based systems, but such systems are known to have numerous issues ranging from their inability to create a true vacuum seal, to the speed at which the vacuum seal dissipates, to the claims that the vacuum process removes the much-desired aromas from the wine, actually making it worse.
Other conventional solutions have attempted to take advantage of several naturally occurring gases, known as “inert gases” that are known to have no effect on wine. Such gasses include Helium (He), Neon (Ne), Argon (Ar), Krypton (Kr), Xenon (Xe), and Radon (Rn). Argon is particularly suitable because it is heavier than oxygen and can therefore displace oxygen in a bottle. Nitrogen, and Nitrogen and Argon blends are also regularly used. These conventional systems are all inadequate at preservation because they function by having the user remove the cork, and then add argon afterwards to reduce oxidation. This is flawed, because once you begin oxidation it's impossible to stop. You can only temporarily slow it down.
Further, conventional systems using inert gasses do not possess any ability to warm the wine, which is limiting as discussed above. Conventional devices also suffer from a lack of automation requiring the user to manually identify the varietal, research the appropriate temperature for that varietal and manually set the temperature.
Still other conventional solutions have integrated an exposed needle mechanism with a regulator and argon to extract wine from an individual bottle. These solutions are limiting because they do not handle refrigeration. They also can only handle small argon canisters because the devices are hand-held, and require the user to hold the device and bottle in mid-air to pour. They are also suffer from a lack of an integrated bottle holder, potentially exposing users to dangerous needles and/or exploding glass bottles. Such devices typically also lack the ability to accommodate multiple bottles of wine, and to track or control the consumption of such bottles and offer recommendations and information regarding various wines via mobile electronic devices and social media. These and other issues are addressed by embodiments of the present disclosure.